Across the Graphic Universe: An Interview with John Berg

John Berg truly had “the best possible job at the best possible
time.” As art director (and later creative director and vice
president) of Columbia/CBS Records from 1961 until 1985, Berg
oversaw a golden age of record cover design. From his office in New
York's Midtown he created covers for Dylan, Springsteen and Monk,
to name just a few. He commissioned photography from Avedon and
illustrations from Glaser and Chwast. He won four Grammys and
countless other music and design industry awards. If you've ever
purchased any popular music from that era, there's a good chance
that it was released by Columbia, and that its visual presentation
was in some way conceived by the creative mind of John Berg.

Photograph of John Berg for Vogue Italia (by Giuseppe Pino,
1982).

Yet decades later, in the age of digital downloads and compact
discs, very few in the design industries seem to remember or
appreciate Berg's significant graphic legacy, even though it's part
of the cultural fabric. Reduced images, such as the ones included
here, do his work little justice. Only by pulling back the gatefold
sleeves of Dylan's Blonde on Blonde or Springsteen's
Born to Run can Berg's masterful exploitation of the
grand-scale format be appreciated. In our practically package-less
age, his work stands as a testament to a more heroic and relevant
time for music.

With such thoughts in mind, I went looking for John Berg and
found him through his wife, Durell Godfrey, a well-known
illustrator and current contributing photographer for The East
Hampton Star, the Long Island newspaper where the couple
resides. She was kind enough to act as an email liaison, bringing
my questions to him, then transcribing his answers and sending them
back to me. It's fitting for AIGA to publish this interview, since
an exhibit of Berg's CBS Records work was mounted in its New York
gallery in the late '70s and traveled to Paris and Ferrara, Italy
(Berg also served on the AIGA board of directors around that time).
Hopefully, Berg's legacy will continue to influence a new
generation of designers who might benefit from his vast
contributions.

Nini: Early on, you held various jobs in advertising and
editorial design. How important were these experiences to you when
you started working at Columbia? Were there skills or approaches
you learned in those other areas that directly applied to the
design of record covers?

Escapade magazine covers, 1959.

Berg: I worked in the promotion art department
at the Atlanta Paper Company for a year, and during that time I was
mentioned twice in the Graphis annual. And I had some
success in designing bottle carrier packaging for Pepsi. I later
worked on accounts at Grey Advertising and Doyle Dane Bernbach
(DDB) agencies in New York. Realizing that advertising was not for
me, I moved over to magazines and was a promotion designer and
later a promotion art director at Esquire. I was there for
three years before moving over to editorial, at a girlie magazine
called Escapade, around 1959. My work there won a lot of
awards from the New York Art Directors Club. There was a lot of
freedom with the layouts—and the pictures were fun! The combination
of these experiences molded my outlook toward graphic design, which
was telling stories conceptually and stylishly.

Nini: In Gary Marmorstein's book The Label: The
Story of Columbia Records, you mention being hired “on the
spot” by Bob Cato. Is there more to the story?

Berg: By 1960 I was out of work and my wife was
pregnant with our first child. We were living in Manhattan, and I
dropped off my portfolio all over the place looking for a job. I
had no expectations, but one day I just took my portfolio up to
Columbia Records. Bob Cato saw me talking to his secretary and
pulled me into his office for an interview. I had never seen him
before, but he seemed to know who I was. He offered me a job on the
spot. I stalled him because I had also interviewed at Life
magazine, and I wanted to hear back from them before making a
decision. After two weeks I took the job at Columbia. I never asked
Bob how he knew who I was.

Nini: You joined Columbia Records as an art director in
1961, following in the footsteps of Alex Steinweiss (from
late '30s to early '60s) and Neil
Fujita, Roy Kuhlman and Bob Cato (during the '50s and '60s).
Did you feel a certain responsibility to further what had been
produced before your time, or more of a desire to take things in
new directions?

Berg: I never worked with Alex Steinweiss, Neil
Fujita or Roy Kuhlman, but was certainly aware of their work. My
approach was very personal. I did what I thought was interesting,
appropriate, informative, intriguing and, most important,
graphically compelling. I think if you can achieve even one of
these, you are doing good work. The more, of course, the better the
work. I think I may have taken things in directions they never
dreamed of.

Bob Dylan “Blonde on Blonde” cover (1966).

Nini: Some of your early work at Columbia included
covers for Bob Dylan, with whom you continued to work for several
years. Did you realize at the time the kind of cultural impact he
would have in the '60s and '70s? What were your experiences working
with him on his record covers—any particular stories worth
noting?

Berg: Bob Dylan was a personal hero to most of
us on the creative end of the record business. The salespeople
actively hated his work and what it stood for. Musically, I thought
he was incredible and years ahead of everyone. We had an in-house
photographer named Don Hunstein. He often photographed Dylan for
me, and Bobby (as we called him) frequently chose the picture he
wanted to use on his album covers. Hunstein shot the first album
cover (Bob Dylan, 1962) on a windowsill at the Columbia
offices. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan (1963), shot on a
snowy street, was also Hunstein's photo, and Bobby chose that
image. Sometimes he would organize his own photo shoots and just
arrive with his favorite picture. The Jerry Schatzberg cover for
Blonde on Blonde is an example of a photo he showed up
with. We worked with that picture rather than coming up with a
total concept, so the type styles and the cropping became our
contributions. I designed the Blonde on Blonde cover for
Dylan so that it folded down. That allowed for an interesting
rectangular/vertical photo instead of the standard square format. I
think it was the first time that had been done with an album. Of
course, the record threatened to fall out, but the graphics were
great.

Milton Glaser's “Dylan” poster (1967).

Nini: You commissioned Milton Glaser to do the now
famous “psychedelic” Dylan poster that became a cultural icon. What
is the story behind that particular project?

Berg: The Milton Glaser poster was assigned by
me to go into Dylan's first Greatest Hits package (1967).
The cover used Rowland Scherman's photo of Dylan's back-lit hair.
That was the first time, to my knowledge, that a poster was shipped
within a record package. The Greatest Hits album was
cooked up because at that time Dylan was recovering from a
motorcycle accident and couldn't produce a new album. An early
sketch from Milton included a harmonica, by the way. That sketch is
long gone. Of course the poster is on the cover of Milton's
book.

Count Basie “Super Chief” cover (1972).

Nini: You had the opportunity to work with a variety of
well-known photographers and illustrators, including Richard
Avedon, Milton Glaser, Paul Davis and Seymour Chwast, to name a
few. How did you decide when it was time to bring in a
collaborator, and what kind of direction did you usually
provide?

Berg: I was intent on winning prestigious AIGA
and Art Directors Club awards, so that I could prevail on artists
and photographers to work within the somewhat limited budgets
available at Columbia Records. I chose photographers and
illustrators who I thought would bring interesting takes on my
concepts. Sometimes I made a sketch (the Count Basie Super
Chief cover—airbrushed by David Willardson—comes to mind). I
also liked to encourage illustrators to try new things with their
art—a watercolor artist to try oils, a drawer to try paint, a type
designer to try rendering in tooled leather. So I did meddle, but I
did not force things. I wanted the work to be intriguing, to tell a
story, to be a fresh take on the subject.

“Cheap Thrills” cover (1967).

Nini: Cartoonist R. Crumb's illustration for Big Brother
and the Holding Company's Cheap Thrills (1967) appears to
have been his only “commercial job,” and a somewhat controversial
one at that. How did this project come about?

Berg: [Janis] Joplin commissioned it, and she
delivered Cheap Thrills to me personally in the office.
There were no changes with R. Crumb. He refused to be paid, saying,
“I don't want Columbia's filthy lucre.”

Nini: The series you did over the life of the band
Chicago is a real landmark in record cover design. What kind of
ideas and approaches were you applying through these
covers?

Berg: Chicago was a unique situation. Jim
Guercio, the musical mind behind the band as well as the band's
manager, and I never wanted to show the band on the album covers
(with the exception of the greatest hits cover). The Chicago logo—I
think the first band logo, per se—was fashioned for me by Nick
Fasciano from my sketch. If you look carefully, the logo, whether
rendered in leather or chocolate, in the form of a map or a bank
note, is always the same size and in the same position on the
cover. It was great fun to try to figure out yet another way to
imagine that logo when a new record cover needed to be done. I
think there were a total of 14 before I left the job. The next
designers didn't notice the graphic game I had been playing, the
consistent size and position. The Chicago logo was inspired by the
Coca-Cola logo, by the way.

Nini: Bruce Springsteen's Born To Run is
another landmark cover, especially as it takes advantage of the
possibilities with the gatefold album sleeve format. How was it
conceived?

Berg: The cover for Born to Run walked
in the door courtesy of photographer Eric Meola, who had done a
photo shoot on spec for Springsteen. Bruce originally wanted a
serious, author-like head shot for the cover. I thought that was a
boring and without an “idea.” I went through the whole photo shoot.
I'm a good photo editor, and I found the beautifully charming shot
of Bruce and Clarence. I sold the idea to management on the basis
of humor and charm. Because of the fold it was an expensive cover
to produce. It was an easy sell to Springsteen—the photo is
wonderful. Now that cover is an icon. The image has even been
copied using Sesame Street characters. Imitation is the
sincerest form of flattery.

Nini: For many years you operated as a true art
director, orchestrating projects with a variety of collaborators.
This approach differs somewhat from what many well-known designers
do today, where they often establish a “signature style.” What do
you think about that trend, and do you prefer one approach over
another?

Berg: I never directly thought about a “style”
to my work. I was just trying to come up with a graphic solution, a
concept for each project. If a style evolved over the years, it
might be inventive typography concepts, one where the letterforms
seem to illustrate what the words are saying—Dave Brubeck's
Bossa Nova USA for example. Sometimes an illustration
would solve the problem, sometimes a photograph. Those projects
were great fun to do. On Thelonius Monk's Underground, a
project with photographers Steve Horn and Norman Griner, the title
of the album came from a current jazz movement, which I twisted
into a version of the French anti-Nazi underground of World War II.
An entire set was built and the scene was full of costumed extras.
There was no problem with budgets in those days. I won a Grammy for
that cover, by the way. Again with Horn/Griner, I devised the cover
of Switched-on Bach with [a stand-in for] Bach and a Moog
synthesizer.

And there were the times when I was just plain lucky, as with
Richard Avedon's photo of a leaping and pointing Sly Stone. I chose
the picture from the shoot and cropped it slightly to have the
pointing finger touch the edge of the cover. Avedon said my design
was the best album ever done from one of his pictures.

Nini: In your work I see interplay between word and
image, sometimes humorous, and attention to typographic detail.
Would you agree that these issues were important to you? Also,
while your work naturally reflects the time it was made, much of it
appears to have a directness and simplicity that holds up well over
the years. Was this a concern of yours, too?

Berg: I think it's a result of classic
principals of graphics with applications of good old storytelling,
humor and great ideas. I enjoy the interplay between image and
word—and humor plays a part where it can. The work should be fun,
either to look at or fun for the imagination. I think the work is
direct, and I am glad to think it holds up over the years. Is that
not the definition of classic?

Nini: Were there any designers from the past or
contemporaries whose work you found particularly
influential?

“Monk” cover (1965), Eugene Smith, photographer.

Berg: A.M. Cassandre, the great French poster
artist who combined graphic design, illustration and high style.
Henry Wolf, art director of Esquire and Harper's
Bazaar in the '50s, used wonderful typography in those
magazines. Paul Rand, whose work was similar to Cassandre in terms
of style. Reid Miles, photographer and designer of jazz albums for
Blue Note, whose great sense of typography was a constant source of
inspiration. Gene
Federico, a brilliant advertising art director who created the
IBM campaign. Lou Dorfsman, who wore many hats at CBS as chief
designer, was a mentor and played a pivotal role in the world of
graphic design at CBS corporate. Milton Glaser, a designer's
designer. Alvin
Lustig, who we lost too young—he was just about the classiest
designer there ever was. I noticed his work while I was still
working in Atlanta, and I bought album covers he designed—before I
had a record player! Alex Steinweiss was the godfather of album
design at Columbia Records and, by extension, the whole business of
graphics in music.

Nini: New York in the '60s seems to have been a very
special place, with culture and commerce coming together in ways
they hadn't before. You were able to have an active role in shaping
the popular culture of the era. Do you have any particular thoughts
reflecting back on that time?

Berg: I had the best possible job at the best
possible time to have that job, at the center of the graphic
universe. These days the dream jobs are in magazines, but at that
time the job every design student wanted was doing record covers.
Working at Columbia/CBS was like going to Harvard—hard to get into,
but gave a wonderful education. The record companies in those days
launched graphic superstars. It was a very heady time, and I know
you can't capture in the tiny CD format what we accomplished
graphically in the 12-inch square that was the record album.
Columbia Records produced hundreds of records every year. I made
sure that they had graphic integrity. That was my job.

CORRECTION: In the introduction, the author originally
referred to John Berg's office on New York's Seventh Avenue. The
reference is not false, but perhaps not the most accurate. Columbia
Records was located there when Berg started in the early 1960s, but
moved later that decade to West 52nd Street and Sixth
Avenue.